0
Talking to a mate over few beers tonight, he commented that if the lawyers got into this thing, potential onwers/operators of the Western Sydney team could go after a "restraint of trade claim". I am no lawyer and nor is he, but to a layman this does look like restraint of trade by NSWRU trying stop a "competitor" starting up in their back yard, purely own the flimsy grounds
“There won’t be a World Series Rugby team based there next year,” Hore said of the proposal to base a WSC franchise in western Sydney. “There is a lot of work to be done around western Sydney and no-body is saying no to that. I think it is just making sure it is done in an effective way. Our whole focus is on unifying the game so anything we do needs to be tied to our new governance model and has the full support of the rugby community. Otherwise you just end up with another fracture.
“That is still open for discussion but everyone is of the opinion it could all be too quickly. And of course you have 2020 on the horizon and the renegotiations of where rugby will be after that.
“We had one meeting with his (Forrest’s) representatives. Everyone is of the agreement that you can have a professional team built on sand. It just doesn’t work. So all the other variables that make a team like that sustainable and even potentially whether it will go ahead at all…..it needs further discussion.
To try to turn around and get a professional team in place by next March … nobody has got the resources, probably outside of Twiggy’s group….at the end of the day, we have to look after 100,000 rugby players in our own state with everything else going on. It’s a lot of work.”
Anyway from the Nick Taylor piece in The West, it sounds like Twiggy is going to let it go and move on with more teams from elsewhere. We dont need anymore court cases.
However if RA, NZRU and SANZAAR pressure Japan into blocking multiple Japanese teams from joining WSR on similar grounds, whose knows? If there are 2-4 top Japanese teams playing WSR, will they still be required to release their players to the Sunwolves playing in Super rugby at the same time as WSR?